How to become an adult in 6 easy steps

Shaken Mama had a really great post about life happening in a house, and it really got me thinking about our house, and how much living we've done here in such a short amount of time. Ferris Beuller said life moves pretty fast, and you never really realize how fast it moves until you stop and watch it for a minute.

This was A.'s house before I came into the picture. It was his bachelor pad. So much so that, when I came inside for the first time on our third date, he kept the lights off. We hooked up on his old couch, that was so decrepit that I got a nasty bruise up my spine from the boards that stuck up from the cushions. There was a big Hank Williams poster on the wall; that was the lone wall decoration. He had a picture of Jeff Goldblum staring at you in the bathroom. Everything was sticky. There was a pile of tires in the living room that somehow constituted a coffee table. The kitchen table was buried under mounds of clothing. He kept his laundry in the dryer and pulled things out as needed.

Not too terribly long after we started dating, the lease on my apartment was up. I started looking for a new apartment and A. suggested I move in with him. I thought he was joking. I signed a new lease for six months, which I had planned to coincide with my college graduation so I could be free to chase job opportunities without being pinned down by a lease.

Six months later, he asked me again to move in with him, and I agreed. After all, I'd been paying about $500 a month for an apartment that was basically a storage unit, since I was crashing at his place every night anyway. I started moving my stuff in, bit by bit, during the last month of my lease.

On June 14, two weeks before my lease was up, I sat in the tiny bathroom of his house and stared at a pregnancy test that was blinking "PREGNANT" at me. (Yeah. I needed the fool-proof digital read.) I took a shower in the tiny shower, which we've since remodeled, trying to wrap my head around what it all meant. I stood in the dining room when he came home and we stared at each other, trying to wrap our heads around what it all meant.

He proposed to me as I sat on the same couch we'd hooked up on the first time, the same old couch where I'd sat up late writing final papers and studying, where we'd drank beer and played video games. The same old couch that my water broke on.

The second bedroom was the "guest bedroom," with all of A.'s guitars on the walls and a bed, where our friends passed out after insane nights of drinking and rocking and belligerence. It was gutted and is now a pink and green rose garden-themed nursery. Our daughter's crib sits where his amps once were. The room we rarely went into is now home to our greatest joy.

The hardwood floors where I passed out so many times now reverberate the plat-plat-plat of little, still a little unsure, feet. The trash that was once filled with beer bottles and fast food bags now sits with diapers and boxes from whatever random brightly colored toy she's brought home from the grandparents this time. The old couch where we fucked, loved, studied, drank, and smoked eventually got sold to a college student for $50 (with a matching loveseat), who didn't ask about the weird stain on the middle cushion, and we bought a new couch, and the living room that I'd originally so carefully designed in marroon, sage and tan is now mostly "primary color" themed with toys everywhere.

About a year after the date where he reluctantly brought me into his house that was embarrassingly dirty, A. carried me over the threshhold of our front door when we came home from Las Vegas after getting married on Halloween 2007. Yes, he picked up and hauled my orca-whale-fat, 5.5 month pregnant ass over the threshhold. Now I catch our daughter standing at that storm door, giddily, furiously pounding on the glass and giggling at the sunshine outside.

The porch where we used to get drunk with friends and play guitar, much to the neighbors' chagrin, now has a primary-colored plastic swing on it, complete with flower boxes full of "pretties." The lawn that we used to mow only when we were being threatened with violations from the city now stays pristinely mowed, as Punky follows behind with her pink Little Tykes mower.


But she keeps a good amount of distance, because the sound of the mower scares her a little more than she'll openly admit.

It's been almost two years since I moved in, since we found out I was pregnant, and life began changing at rapid pace. And it'll continue to change and morph until we eventually move to a bigger house and start over, and someone else will move in here, most likely completely oblivious to the furious amount of life that's happened in this little house.

But in the meantime, I'll sit on this couch (the new one, where the only stains are from sippy cups, and there aren't any potential injuries waiting to happen) and smile at the changes that have come and continue to come.